The Obsidian Order Project
Resurrecting the Dead

"Did you know that the Obsidian
Order saves everything that comes into its possession? You never know
what might prove useful."
- Entek, "Second
Skin"[DSN3]

For the most part, Vs. sites are no different
than any other website . . . they tend to come and
go. Few site builders have ever gone to the trouble
of getting top-level domain names (i.e. ST-v-SW.Net), and those
who do then had to continue to be interested enough to shell out the
continuing cash to maintain it. While this may change as
hosting prices drop and similar-but-free alternatives increase, this
meant that in the past most Vs. sites were just little
quickie-sites. These might be hosted on the webspace one
would get from their ISP, as was the case with Wong's StarDestroyer.Net
in its original sympatico.ca location, or elsewhere.
ST-v-SW.Net started its life on university webspace much as the
Vs.-related "Star Wars Technical Commentaries" did. A rare
few other sites existed on free webspace (such as Poe's original
h4h.com URL or some on old Tripod sites) or had subdomain-based URL
redirection via services like the long-defunct Monolith.

Many such sites were never taken any further by their creators, and
over time most if not all have disappeared. This Obsidian
Order Project, named after the first entry below, is an attempt to
resurrect the sites for their historical value.

Versus Sites

A Vs. Debater who went by the moniker of 'Elim Garak' once had a
series of lovely pages on his Qwest.net provider's webspace under the
directory "ObsidianOrder". His pages were geared toward
publicizing the most embarrassing technical
quotes from the Star Wars non-canon. Granted, for the purposes of my
site, such quotes are irrelevant . . . however, they made an
interesting
counterpoint to those who have tried to wank out Star Wars tech in
recent years.

When I noticed that the pages seemed to be going up and down
repeatedly, I decided to save them to my hard drive. The site then fell
permanently, and
eventually I reposted these under the presumption that the author
wouldn't
mind. I marked this page with a request that he contact
me. In December 2003, the original author
did indeed get in touch and thanked me for keeping the pages
alive. It was, of
course, my pleasure.

This is not a perfect reposting . . . only the main pages are
present due to the database format of the originals, so the
source-specific pages are left out. However, all the information
should be
present. I have not amended the pages' internal links
to work properly, since many of the links would be dead anyway.
The pages have, however, been modified with
header and footer to assist in navigation back here or to my main index.

Despite the uninspiring title, January's pages were some of the
better material available in the late 1990's. Though clearly
based on some of the pro-Wars arguments of the era and thus subject to
all manner of potential corrections and counterpoints, January's pages
were vastly superior to those of his comrades. His analyses
were reasoned and comparatively reasonable, appearing thorough and
honest, and there are often references to contradictions instead of
attempts to sweep them under the rug and dismiss the less-than-helpful
examples.

His pages aren't perfect by any means, but his calm, honest, and
open approach on the pages is light-years beyond the rabid,
angry, venom-filled rhetoric currently the norm among the main
pro-Wars contingent. Thus, while January's work is largely
obsolete since much of it is based on the non-canon of both universes,
in general his pages remain a model to which they should aspire.

The pages available here are originally from the Wayback
Machine. I have edited them only to remove the Wayback
coding, space-wasting links to the long-defunct "Star Trek vs. Star
Wars webring", and to ensure that internal links work
fine. I also fixed a small number of coding
glitches. Their presence is entirely understandable . . .
remember, this was back when it was perfectly likely that a webpage
would be built entirely in a text editor like Notepad!

Created by a team inspired in part by ST-v-SW.Net, this site
burst upon the scene in November 2004 with over 40 webpages of
opinionated arguments and commentary already in-hand. Soon
a forum was created, and during 2005 this was the premiere location for
Star Trek vs. Star Wars debates, bar none.

As their decidedly pro-Trek website constituted a
readily-visible fortified position it was frequently under fire in the
early days, whether via sniping from afar or frontal attack at the
forums by SD.Net swarmers. However, due to the time
required by the forums there was little time left to update,
idiot-proof, and/or correct the pages, much less to create new
ones. And of course, as time went on this problem only
increased.

As a result, within a couple of months the authors announced
that the main pages were no longer to be updated and were, in effect,
left up as an archive version. With the main pages thus
unsupported, the creators had a free hand to enjoy the forums. However,
by the end of 2005 the creators were getting a bit burned out, and yet
were still paying the costs for the domain and bandwidth.

All good things come to an end . . . and so in January 2006 it
was announced that the site and its forum would be shutting
down. Another individual volunteered to take the forums and
host them elsewhere, and the authors agreed to allow the old pages to
be hosted here.

Right, so above I mentioned how another individual volunteered to
take the forums and host them elsewhere. Well, see, that never actually
happened. At least some files were at least temporarily housed at renegate.frozenflame.org
under the "strek-v-swars" folder, but nothing ever came of it and there's nothing
on Wayback. People including myself tried to get the files from elsewhere or
pester the guy, but to no avail.

Every so often, I would go looking around, checking Wayback, et cetera. Finally
in 2014 I discovered that there was a little bit of stuff on Wayback, but not terribly
much. But somehow the experience triggered a memory in my senile brain, and upon
further digging I found that I had, in fact, saved some of the threads I was most
interested in finding again. Enjoy.

Back in 2002 or 2003, a fellow contacted me
and started sending
samples of his utter takedown of StarDestroyer.Net, written in the same
style and even as a response to that site's fictitious Imperial author
"Jarren Korr", but instead written from the perspective of the
Federation's shadow group
Section 31 and one of its most fascinating characters,
Sloan. The takedown was composed of a huge mass of Word
documents, and it was agreed
that I would help convert them to HTML and stylize them
properly to serve as his own little sub-site to my own. A teaser of
this project was posted back in March 2003.

Unfortunately, the guy was a total machine, and I was
overwhelmed. Eventually, as noted on this ancient upcoming
projects page, it was decided
that he would seek to make his own full site himself, though to my
knowledge nothing ever came of it. I hated to see the work wasted, and ten years later I found
that he'd been providing the private link to it elsewhere, as seen on this response page from "Darth Timon". (That's not meant in a bad way, it
just means I don't feel bad posting it publicly.)

So, click on the Defiant and see a taste of what might have been.

Non-Versus Sites

ST-v-SW.Net this may be, but this is also a site run by a Star
Trek and Star Wars buff. If only I could get my hands on the old pages
of Bob Brown! But, I do have a fine selection of older Star
Trek-related sites which I would frequently bump into back in the olden
days.

Imagine some future historian trying to piece together Western
Civilization with all its records lost to the ages, only to bump into a
copy of all the data from Wikipedia. That was my experience with SWDAO
back in the day. All sides of every detailed excursion into the
starships of Trek canon were on display, and despite being a relatively
small site it was jam-packed with information.

Much of the work was discussed frequently at the Flare forums,
and even long after the site's departure thread titles might reference
old SWDAO entries as such. In the era of the high-definition
remastering of Star Trek's original series and, as of this writing, The
Next Generation's more faithful remastering, many of the discussions
from SWDAO are now obsolete, and many of the unknowns are now known . .
. but not all.

Even for the answered questions, this is worth a read to see
many of Flare's
masters of observation at their craft. The file dates I
have are from 2006 but the last updates seem to be from long before
that.

This is not a Star Trek vs. Star Wars site, but I'm archiving it
anyway.

Sometimes when you're discussing the Star Trek vs. Star Wars
topic, you'll end up searching for some esoteric bit of data that you
really don't expect to find. Back during my ASVS days, such
searches in regards to Trek would often end up with
"www.cakes.mcmail.com/StarTrek/" showing up in the results.
I'm not sure I ever got to actually use any of the data this fellow
made available, but I was always impressed by the site . . . even if it
was just donated webspace from a cake shop.

The site featured examinations of certain aspects of Star Trek
technology with a view toward real physics. On both scores
the pages were written excellently. The Star Trek tech info does
make extensive use of the Star Trek technical manuals. Most
of the time I would simply note that this is merely forgivable, but
Whiteside managed to extract some fascinating data from the manuals and
explore them in ways I've not seen before. Further, he managed to
include a great deal of canon information (even from Voyager) at a time
before the DVDs and episode transcripts were readily available, so
there's no question as to the work he put in.

The site wasn't updated after January of 2000, which is a
shame. Nonetheless, the site hung around for quite awhile
online. In late December 2006 I was going through my hard drive
and found where I'd saved a copy of the site in late June
2003. When I checked online to see if the site was still
around, I found that it was gone and, judging by the Internet Archive
Wayback Machine, it's been gone since May 2006. Even the domain
mcmail.com is no longer active.

The contact methods given on the old pages are dead, so as with
the original Obsidian uploading and the January pages these are
archived pending permission. But frankly, I'm rather proud to
resurrect this site. I hope you find it as fascinating as I used
to, and still do.